Monday, January 13, 2014

‘Comfortable being gay’: a priest speaks

He asks to be described as a religious-order
priest comfortable with his sexuality.

He is gay.

It is “one aspect of
his life”.

He doesn’t like the term “gay priest”.

Before this interview
he pondered whether to let us publish his name.

But, he realised, “I
don’t have any desire to make a major dramatic statement. It doesn’t
define me, and I don’t want to be defined by it. I don’t want to draw
huge attention.”

A few years after his ordination
he began to tell people about his sexuality. “I began to open up to
friends and colleagues. Then it got to the point where I got tired
telling. The need went away. Anyone who needs to know knows. It’s not an
issue.”

He has been aware of his orientation
since puberty. It played a part in his realising he had a vocation to
the priesthood. “Despite the [church’s] negative teaching I never had
the sense that God didn’t love me.”

In his teens he “used to call into the
church on the way home from school. It was the one place where I could
be myself. God knew who I was. My sense of a calling had its seeds
there.”

He also realised that priesthood was “a
way of doing something worthwhile without declaring orientation”. He
feels he was lucky being an order priest when it came to formation.

There was “none of the narrow-mindedness” he associated with the
seminary in Maynooth.

He and fellow students had “more freedom within
the self.

There was never a negative message. It was very broad-minded.”

While not spelling out issues around their own
sexuality, they were encouraged to be “as open as we could be” and “to
grow in relationships”.

It helped too that he could read the works of
contemporary moral theologians who wrote compassionately about
homosexuality.

He came to realise some colleagues
shared the same orientation but “very few were naming it as gay, but
many were and still are, in hindsight.”

He agrees with former president Mary McAleese, who said in a Glasgow Herald interview, published last Tuesday, that significant numbers of Catholic priests are gay.

As
a priest he has preached sympathetically about gay people and
challenged the church’s teaching on homosexuality and its treatment of
gay people.

He was called in by a bishop once for doing so.

In the main
he has experienced no problems from the laity when he does so, apart
from a few right-wing Catholics.

Running away

He
believes that for some colleagues who share his orientation, becoming a
priest was about “running away from sex while having a role and status
in life”.

Indeed, he felt that “probably a lot of men and women, gay or
straight”, who became priests or nuns, “were running away from
sexuality”.

But “if that is their primary reason,
it is not enough unless you are willing to become comfortable with
yourself”. Failure to achieve this comfort is why some clergy became
“angry, short [with people], bitter”, he believes.

Accepting
himself as he is has contributed positively to his sense of vocation.
“I know the margins. I know the edges, the fear of rejection, insult. I
know what those experiences are like. If you grow, be honest, be true;
that can be positive when dealing with other people on the margins,” he
says.

In 1986 in a Vatican document the then cardinal Joseph Ratzinger
described homosexuality as “a more or less strong tendency ordered
towards an intrinsic moral evil; and thus the inclination itself must be
seen as an objective disorder”.

In November 2005 the cardinal, by then Pope Benedict
XVI, introduced new regulations for seminaries whereby men who had
“deep-rooted homosexual tendencies’’ may not be accepted for the
priesthood.

This Irish priest found the language
“awful”, even if in church circles its meaning was not quite the same.

It was all “part of a huge movement back to a pre-Vatican II church,” he
said.

But it was “incredible”.

He was “very hurt by it”.

It was “an
injustice, and a huge hypocrisy when it was known that many promulgating
such teaching were themselves homosexual”.

Many such people, he felt,
had in fact themselves become “desexualised”.

Inappropriate conduct

He disagrees with Mary McAleese’s comments about Cardinal Keith O’Brien, the former leader of the Catholic Church in Scotland, who resigned last year after allegations that he had engaged in inappropriate sexual conduct with junior priests.

In her Herald interview McAleese
said: “I would have thought Cardinal Keith O’Brien, in telling the story
of his life – if he was willing to do that – could have been of great
assistance to gay people, not just in the church but elsewhere, who felt
over many, many years constrained to pretend to be heterosexual while
at the same time acting a different life.”

She said that, like so many
closet homosexuals, Cardinal O’Brien hoped to divert attention from
himself by raising his voice “in the most homophobic way”.

The
priest says that: “Mary McAleese has done a great service [to gay
people] by saying what she has said. She loves the church, so when she
says anything about the church she has to be listened to.”

But he feels
“a degree of sympathy” for Cardinal O’Brien.

“It
is probable that he is nowhere near understanding his own story. He was
very publicly exposed, with fingers pointing. It’s an awful place.”

The
priest was aware of colleagues who had worked with the cardinal in
Edinburgh. “They found him supportive and, while conservative, he was
pastorally decent. It’s sad. He is a product of the institutional
church. I would not be judgmental.”

As for
McAleese’s observation that the Catholic Church had been in denial over
homosexuality for decades and that it was a case of “not so much the
elephant in the room but a herd of elephants”, when it came to the
number of homosexual priests, it is what he himself has been saying for
years.

“The Catholic Church’s teaching on
sexuality in general needs recasting, whether it be issues related to
marriage, contraception, homosexuality, the whole range. It needs to be
looked at – and not in a fearful way: through science, psychology and
experience. People are more open about the subject than before. It needs
to be more compassionate.”

Moral theology in the
past “tried the impossible. It tried to legislate for every possible
situation. But human nature is complex, and one size does not fit all.
It needs renewal.”

Very hopeful

He is “very hopeful” in all of this where Pope Francis
is concerned.

“He is humane, kind, compassionate and gives a huge sense
of being open to dialogue”.

As for himself the priest is “happy where I
am in my own life”.

He believes in being hopeful
and recalls Oscar Wilde’s words: “We are all in the gutter but some of
us are looking at the stars.”